Incentives and web browsers

A little while ago, I had a dream which stuck with me. It was the first night after a few days of sickness that I didn't
take any medicine to aid my sleep, so it felt particularly vivid and urgent.

I woke up very startled, and (as you do) immediately started researching the business models of our browser vendors.

…

In my dream, I was using my computer and noticed that my web browser was behaving unusually slowly. I dug into the
problem, opened up the developer tools, and discovered that there was a disturbing amount of information being gathered
about my behavior and being sent to somewhere on the internet. By disturbing, I mean that the quantity and detail of
information was huge—records of keystrokes and mouse movements, videos of my face while navigating their site, audio
recordings of conversations I had with my wife…

I panicked, deleted all that I could find, and then went looking for the source. I discovered that it was not a virus or
malware that was collecting this data, but a feature built into the web browser itself. Horrified, I contacted the email
list of browser developers with my findings only to get a reply that they were just providing features needed for these
websites to function.

While this dream was overdramatic, there is a surprising amount of realism to it. It was about analytics. Our browsers
(and network, and ISP) all provide information to the web pages we visit. It's this information that allows
advertisements appear to follow us all around the web.

Want to see an example of this data? Take a look at your Google ads settings,
which holds the information gleaned from your browsing habits. For me, it's surprisingly accurate.

So the morning after this dream, I started to think more about incentives. How is it that every popular web browser (any
single one being a great feat of software engineering) is available for free? What motivates these companies to give
them away?

I think that the most reliable way to answer this sort of question is to follow the money and its incentives.

And summing this all up, the following companies are responsible for our web browser usage:

Browser Producer

Usage %

Google

61.22%

Apple

13.31%

Mozilla

8.02%

Microsoft

7.54%

Alibaba

7.44%

Unaccounted

2.48%

So now to get a better understanding of what incentives these companies have, let's dive into understanding where they
get their money. Thankfully, every single one of these companies is either publicly traded or discloses their
financials.

As a software engineer who has worked mostly on the web, I've worked on several different analytics pipelines and tools.
I've even helped integrate websites with advertisement networks.

I once built a clever piece of an in-house web framework which, in order for developers to write code that reacts to
mouse clicks and key events, the system would automatically send all of this event data to our servers for analysis.
This provided us with all the data we needed to understand how users were interacting with our features without having
developers need to maintain this tracking. From this data, we could construct recordings of our users using the site.

From a business perspective, this was fantastic, as we got tons of information about how our features were used and how
our experiments were performing. But in my dream, I would have been the enemy.

Do you want to learn more? Was something confusing? Was something insightful? In the NYC area
and want to grab a coffee? Feel free to drop me an email at
sufian@gmail.com or send a tweet my way
@sufianrhazi

Disclaimer: Unless stated otherwise, the above words are my own and do not represent the
opinions of any person or business but myself.